The new $3.1-billion Canada-Ontario health agreement will be transparent and monitored in a rigorous manner, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said today during a press conference at Health Sciences North in Sudbury.
The prime minister met with hospital officials, local members of parliament and other community leaders Friday morning.
Trudeau said the funding is part of a $200-billion federal health transfer commitment to invest over the next 10 years with all the provinces.
"We know that as we look to improve health-care systems and health-care outcomes for Canadians, we need to make sure it's being measured in a rigorous, transparent, comparable way," said Trudeau.
The oversight he referred to is key, Trudeau said, so "people can know what their tax dollars are delivering in terms of improvements to our health-care system.”
“It also is about modernizing the system, getting rid of fax machines, making sure that people have access to health-care data, and that their specialists or their pharmacists have access to the right information to make sure people get the best quality of care,” he said.
In terms of questions from reporters, Trudeau was asked about dealing with provinces such as Ontario and Alberta that take a different approach by promoting private health care initiatives in a way that appears to be promoting a two-tier health system, something crtitics say is contrary to the Canada Health Act.
Trudeau was adamant that the feds would claw back funding if the provinces didn't follow the rules.
"It is built into the agreements that we are assigning, built into the $200 billion we are transferring for health care across the country,” he said. “That respect for the Canada Health Act is tantamount. As a government we have clawed back, pulled back money from provinces that have not abided by the rules."
He added that health care must be available to all Canadians when they need it.
"We expect public health care to be reinforced and strengthened as, unfortunately, we see Conservative politicians, including at the federal level, muse about two-tier health care. We know that in Canada, health care needs to be available for everyone, high-quality for everyone and accessible in a timely matter, for everyone," he said.
Trudeau added that the new agreements will be closely monitored to ensure the provinces meet the standards and expectations of the Canada Health Act.
"A huge cornerstone of these agreements that we're signing with the provinces are around better rigorous data collection, so that Canadians can know right across the country that they are getting the very best quality of care necessary and that improvements that are brought in in one part of the country can be modeled and taken on in other parts of the country."
The PM also commented that part of the agreement for upgrading health care means more learning spaces will be provided for medical learners in the North.
"In terms of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM University), we're announcing 30 more undergraduate spots and 41 more post-graduate spots to ensure that there are the health-care workers and indeed the primary-care physicians here in the North trained in the North."
Len Gillis covers health care and mining for Sudbury.com.